Thursday, August 19, 2010

The CAN WE DATE Flowchart

Head Job

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Print These on Adhesive Paper. Cut and Paste on your Newspapers.

Ever wonder why feature editors of different newspapers always write about the same locations? They were paid, of course, to sing hallelujahs so you poor lackeys would drool and save. Oh man, journalism can be idealist but it can also be deceiving. Here's a way to fight back. These are stickers designed by British comedian Tom Scott to be pasted on the news items you've been reading and felt aghast. Here's the PDF link

The Full List
Works are arranged in chronological order of appearance.

1960s (and earlier)

* William Hazlitt, "On Common-Place Critics." The Examiner, November 24, 1816. [Ed's note: Republished in Hazlitt's The Round Table: A Collection of Essays on Literature, Men and Manners, Volume 2.]

* Joseph Mitchell, "All You Can Hold for Five Bucks." The New Yorker, April 15, 1939. A brilliant description of the nearly extinct traditional New York "beefsteak" dinner, but almost all of the stories in [Mitchell's] collectionUp in the Old Hotelmerit inclusion.

* David Felton, "The Lyman Family's Holy Siege of America." Rolling Stone. Part I: December 23, 1971; Part II: January 2, 1972. Rolling Stone for several years in the 70s was, along with Co-Evolution, was the best periodical going. I saw you listed the Patty Hearst story. But for my money the absolute best was this creepy but true story on the Mel Lyman cult.

* John McPhee, "Coming into the Country." The New Yorker, June 20, 1977.One of the best articles about Alaska, and Alaskans.

1980s

* John McPhee, "Basin and Range (Part I)." The New Yorker, October 20, 1980.Clear and interesting explanations about geology and plate tectonics for the layperson.

* George W.S. Trow, "Within the Context of No Context." The New Yorker, November 17, 1980. Brilliant, eccentric, apocalyptic writing about the nature of the cultural devastation television has wrought.

* Paul Nelson, "The Crackup and Resurrection of Warren Zevon." Rolling Stone, March 19, 1981. Tough, fearless and a very memorable look at Zevon's alcoholism and his attempt at recovery.

** George Plimpton, "The Curious Case Of Sidd Finch." Sports Illustrated, April 1, 1985. I remember being extremely angry (for a few minutes) that the Mets were going to get this guy instead of my A's. I was an honest kid and man, it just seemed so unfair. When I realized it was a prank, I wasn't as upset. Because I always thought this guy, in some form, would someday show up and blow away the Twins, the Angels, and the Giants wearing an A's uniform. I'm still waiting!

* Frank Deford, "The Boxer and the Blonde." Sports Illustrated, June 17, 1985.Story of a hard Pittsburgh boxer and the woman who captured his heart.

* James Fenton, "The Snap Revolution." Granta, 1986. What happened in Manila, and in Malacanang Palace, when the Marcoses fell.

* Calvin Trillin, "Covering the Cops." The New Yorker, February 17, 1986.Terrific profile of Edna Buchanan

* Gary Smith, "Shadow of a Nation." Sports Illustrated, February 18, 1991.Feature on the Crow Indians -- the story that won him his first National Magazine Award.

** Richard Preston, "The Mountains of Pi." The New Yorker, March 2, 1992.Two brothers build a supercomputer from mailorder parts in the New York apartment. All it does is compute new digits of Pi.

* Russ Rymer, "A Silent Childhood." The New Yorker. Part 1: April 13, 1992;Part II: April 20, 1992. The two-part article was later reworked into the book,Genie: a Scientific Tragedy, the story of a feral child discovered in LA in 1970, and how she was used as a guinea pig to test linguistic theories.

* Richard Preston, "Crisis in the Hot Zone." The New Yorker, October 26, 1992. "If there were any significant airborne transmissibility to the disease, the situation would be much different." "How so?" "There would be a lot fewer of us.

* Louis de Bernieres, "The Brass Bar." Granta, 1993. Callow writer and recently-graduated English major decides to expose himself to the rich language of the working class by taking a job as a mechanic, and discovers a brass bar that's so fucking pukka you'd want to spunk yourself.

* Hunter S. Thompson, "Song of the Sausage Creature." Cycle World, March 1995. Unfortunately the magazine's web site doesn't include the article, but it's available on various other sites without permission; just Google the title. [Ed.'s note: Also republished in Thompson's Kingdom of Fear and Klancher's The Devil Can Ride.]

* George McKeena, "On Abortion: A Lincolnian Position." The Atlantic Monthly, September 1995. I don't agree with the political position, but I do recall it as one of the most rational, thoughtful articles I've read on the subject.

* Barry Lopez, "On the Wings of Commerce." Harper's, October 1995. An excellent view inside the hidden world of commercial air freight, which powers a big chunk of the global economy. Think Neal Stevenson's glass necklace (see below), but airborne.

** Bill Joy, "Why the future doesn't need us." Wired, April 2000. The best magazine article I've ever read-- by which I mean the piece that came out of nowhere and just knocked my socks off and changed the way I think about the human species.

* Malcolm Gladwell, "The Pitchman." The New Yorker, October 30, 2000. Part story teller and part sleuth, he gets beyond the simple sound bite to the core of what drives Popeil and his process. The fundamental takeaway is the inseparability of product design and product marketing in building products designed to be coveted by the customer they are target for.

* Rebecca Mead, “You’ve Got Blog.” The New Yorker, November 13, 2000.Profile of two bloggers before I knew what a blog was.

* William Langewiesche, "The Million Dollar Nose." The Atlantic Monthly, December 2000. About Wine critic Robert Parker.

** James B. Stewart, "The Matchmaker." The New Yorker, Aug 20, 2001. A revealing look into the secret world of Steinway Hall in New York City and one remarkable seller of pianos with troubled memories.

* Edward W. Said "The Clash of Ignorance." The Nation, October 22, 2001. In response to Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations."

* James B. Stewart, "The Real Heroes Are Dead." The New Yorker, February 11, 2002.In 1998, Susan Greer, a divorced New Jersey housewife in her fifties, fell in love with Rick Rescorla, an old-fashioned man of action seemingly from a bygone era. He worked as vice president for security for a financial firm, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. Three years later, Rescorla died a hero at the World Trade Center, a tragedy he had long foreseen. Like the best storytellers, Stewart builds his tale so masterfully that, even though you already know the ending, it's still devastating, devastating, devastating.

* William Langewiesche, "American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center." The Atlantic Monthly. Part I: "The Inner World," July/August 2002; Part II: "The Rush to Recover," September 2002; Part III: "The Dance of the Dinosaurs," October 2002. [Ed.'s note: Excerpts are available from The Atlantic. Republished as Langewiesche's American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center.]

* Michael Pollan, "An Animal’s Place." The New York Times Magazine, November 10, 2002. It's about meat eating, and farming, and nutrition, but mostly it's about the hypocrisy of veganism or vegetarianism as an animal friendly way of life.

** Chris Jones, "Home." Esquire, July 1, 2004. A lovely meditation on loneliness and homesickness. Follows the astronauts on board the International Space Station when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on reentry in 2003, grounding the shuttle program and leaving them stranded in orbit.

* Malcolm Gladwell, "Million-Dollar Murray." The New Yorker, February 13, 2006. In it, he follows a homeless alcoholic and talks with the hospital he is constantly in and out of and determines that the man costs them about a million dollars a year because he is uninsured. Besides the fabulous writing and the incredible way in which Gladwell argues his point about how paying for insurance for the man is infinitely smarter, it is a story of how the argument that the gov't shouldn't take care of people in this way is leading us into economic hell.

* Kevin Kelly, "Scan This Book." The New York Times Magazine, May 14, 2006.

** Gene Weingarten, "Pearls Before Breakfast." The Washington Post, Magazine, April 8, 2007. Joshua Bell is one of the world's greatest violinists. His instrument of choice is a multimillion-dollar Stradivarius. If he played it for spare change, incognito, outside a bustling Metro stop in Washington, would anyone notice?

*** Chris Jones, "The Things That Carried Him." Esquire, May 2008. It’s extremely moving without being saccharine or twee. It’s a military story, but utterly without jingoism or indictment. And it’s wonderfully observed.

* Peter Alsop, Livia Corona, "Fin: The Last Days of Fish." Good, September 5, 2008. An excellent look at the sad state of our oceans and the fishing industry.

** Michael Lewis, "The End." Portfolio, November 11, 2008. Breaks down supposedly complex economic cause and effect into very engaging, easily understood analysis. Real life characters as interesting and entertaining as the best fiction. A must.

** Michael Lewis, "Wall Street on the Tundra." Vanity Fair, April 2009. It's an in depth analysis of the financial collapse of Iceland. Excellent. There are some great one liners (this isn't actually one of them, but it'll give you the idea): "This in a country the size of Kentucky, but with fewer citizens than greater Peoria, Illinois. Peoria, Illinois, doesn’t have global financial institutions, or a university devoting itself to training many hundreds of financiers, or its own currency. And yet the world was taking Iceland seriously."

** Skip Hollandsworth, "Still Life." Texas Monthly, May 2009. A Texas teenager is paralyzed from the neck down in a sports accident. His condition requires that he always lay down. Skip Hollandsworth's moving, detailed account captures a family who lived in a time capsule for over 30 years.

** David Grann, "Trial by Fire: Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man?" The New Yorker, September 7, 2009. Portrait of the unjust conviction and execution of Cameron Todd Willingham. The piece perfectly portrays the U.S.'s broken justice system; the way Grann unfolds the story is a slow hammer blow.

* Janet Malcolm, "Iphigenia in Forest Hills." The New Yorker, May 3, 2010. A compelling look at a murder trial, the rituals of a courtroom and a contemplation on being a journalist all rolled into one.

* Errol Morris, "The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is." The New York Times, Opinion, June 20, 2010. There's been a lot of well-written, breezy books on the brain in the last--well, I don't know; since I've been paying attention?--but this series maps the concepts of perception and the physiology behind perceiving reality and the harsh truth of reality to interesting, practical anecdotes, some of which are recent, and some of which are historical. It's fascinating.

* Michael Hastings, "The Runaway General." Rolling Stone, June 22, 2010. An entertaining read and because of impact it had on Army leadership it has become historically important.